Adam Thomas Jones was born January 15, 1965 in Park Ridge, Illinois. He married Korin Faught (a painter) on July 6, 2013. They have 2 children together. Jones is a three-time Grammy Award-winning American musician and visual artist, best known as the guitarist for Tool. He has been rated the 75th Greatest Guitarist of all time by the Rolling Stone and placed ninth in Guitar World’s Top 100 Greatest metal Guitarists.
He began his musical career playing acoustic bass in the orchestra, and later played electric bass in the band Electric Sheep (Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine was also in the band).
Jones has played electric guitar for the band Tool since it was formed in 1990, and is heavily involved in the writing process. He also shoots photographs that are used in the visual effects at Tool performances.
Adam Jones is known for not predominantly using any particular guitar playing technique, but rather combining many techniques such as “alternately utilizing power chords, scratchy noise, chiming arpeggios, off-beat rhythm patterns, and a quiet minimalism”. On the albums Lateralus and 10,000 Days, he made heavy use of triplets. Other techniques used to expand his band’s sound repertoire require forms of instrumental experimentation and applications of non-instrumental experimentation as well, such as his use of an Epilady as a plectrum on the Ænima and Lateralus albums for example; continuing in this direction on the Tool song, “Jambi”, Jones uses a talk box. In the song “Third Eye”, he makes use of a guitar slide for the opening. He has two synthesizers that are listed below in his effects section. Live, Adam can be seen with a large pedalboard full of effects, including a DOD FX-40B Equalizer (EQ) pedal, Boss BF-2 Flanger, Boss DD-3 Digital Delay, MXR Micro Amp, Dunlop BB535 and two Boss Master switch/power supply pedals among a few others. In a 1994 interview, he mentioned the band Helmet as an influence.
In addition to his career in music Jones worked on set of the TV show Monsters for awhile in the special effects department, and then went on to work in Hollywood. He was involved in makeup and/or set design for movies including: Predator II, Jurassic Park, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Dances with Wolves, The 4th & 5th Nightmare On Elm Street movies,and Ghostbusters II. He also was heavily involved in Tool’s music videos, and in 2007 received the Grammy Award for ‘Best Recording Package’ as art director on 10,000 Days.